To Die For (34 page)

“No,” she said in a quavering voice. “She did not have a lot of friends. She had friends, but, I mean, she didn't have a lot of callers.”

Despite having a suspect in custody, Antoniadas wanted to tighten up his case. Detective Mark Cordova, Antoniadas' partner, had interviewed Dora's boyfriend, Louis. If they needed to, they could talk to him again. He was pretty broken up. Antoniadas had assigned Detective Mason Yeo to track down the paper—the bank records, the store receipts, the original checks from the bank—and to interview the clerks to nail down the times, see if they recognized Dana's picture from a six-pack of mug shots. Antoniadas wanted to profile Dana as well as Dora and find out something about their personalities and their habits. He also wanted to know how Dana had gotten into the house.

“OK. In reference to Dora's habits, was she pretty outgoing?”

“No, she was a very retiring person. Very much to herself.”

“OK. How would she behave with strangers if somebody came to the house? I don't know how to put this any other way, but was she gullible or was she pretty sharp if somebody came to the house and wanted to go in—was she suspicious of people?”

“She never let anybody in. She was very cautious,” Helen said. “That's why I can't understand this, because I can't see how she'd let anybody in.”

“OK,” Antoniadas said. “Is there anything else you can tell me about Dora that you think is important? Any of her habits? Anywhere she frequented?”

Helen paused again.

“Well, she was a very religious person,” she said. “She sang in the choir. She's the one that got me into the choir. Her husband is the one that got my husband into ushering and we used to go to church together all the time.”

2:06 P.M.

“She was a very caring person,” said Darlene Addison, the nursing supervisor who had fired Dana. “She was the first person to go when someone was down and out. The flood victims—she gathered clothes; the dog shelter—she gathered cans. She organized everybody's life as well as her own. I had no contact with her after I terminated her because, of course, she hated me and let it be known to everyone in surgery that she hated me.

“I have letters from her. Many cards from her. You know, stating life was getting rough. She was having a hard time … dealing with the bankruptcy, the divorce, the loss of her house, the foreclosure … the world was closing in on her.”

Darlene said that Dana had a lot of “idiosyncrasies,” but didn't think she was capable of committing murder. Antoniadas wanted to know how well she fit in with the other nurses at the hospital.

“One of the girls summed it up in that our surgery is like a family and it's probably the best home life Dana ever had,” Darlene said. “She had a hard time fitting into situations and we made a lot of allowances for her and she did seem to function very well there.”

Darlene said that Dana was hard to work with because she always had to be in control and organize everything around her—her own life and everyone else's. She was domineering and critical and made her co-workers' lives miserable until they let Dana take the reins. When she first started in obstetrics, no one got along with her and the hospital considered terminating her. Dana asked to be moved to post-op recovery, and fit in there a little better. Darlene decided to give her a chance and moved Dana to surgery, where she worked up to the point that she was fired for stealing drugs.

Antoniadas had expected Dana to be controlling in her work life like she was in her personal life. But he had to know something else.

“I know this is a strange question, but I have obvious reasons for asking. Did she ever have any problems with any of the elderly people?”

“None at all,” Darlene said. “She took excellent care of people. As far as patient care, I've never had a complaint. I've had a complaint about other co-workers against her, but never a patient complaint …

“She is sarcastic. She does get her point across if she's crossed, or doesn't get her way. But I mean, that's something that we all knew and accepted.”

3 P.M.

The clanking from the thick shackles around Dana's ankles cut through the buzz of casual conversation. The bored photographers and reporters sprang into action as she entered the courtroom, escorted by two sheriff's deputies. The press had been waiting most of the day for her arraignment. Dana's cuffed hands were awkwardly linked to a thick chain slung around her hips. She nervously scanned the courtroom, stone silent except for the whirring of motor-driven cameras. She spotted a few familiar faces. She pretended not to see her brother Rick, who was sitting with the cluster of reporters. She saw Lisa Sloan, a nurse she'd worked with at Inland Valley Regional Medical Center. She knew Russell and Jeri would not attend her arraignment, but would visit with her later. Rich Bentley was seated at the prosecution side of the counsel table, next to the defense table facing the judge. Dana sat down next to her court-appointed lawyer, Deputy Public Defender Stuart Sachs, trying to ignore murmurs from the crew of news photographers and reporters and the drone of high-speed cameras. While the press was waiting, Bentley fed reporters a few quotes about nabbing the county's first and only known female serial killer. He told them that getting a chance to prosecute a female serial killer “is rare.”

The purpose of an arraignment is to formally read the accused the charges they are facing and allow them to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. It is typically a very brief, pro forma procedure—a legal necessity lacking the glamour of a trial, live witnesses or the dramatic presentation evidence. In this case, though, it was the media's first look at the comely serial killer who had been terrorizing the region's elderly population. The judge had acquiesced to requests to photograph the defendant and was allowing a few minutes for pictures before he took the bench and started the proceedings. Dana was like a caged, feral animal. She was forced to sit and have her picture taken whether she liked it or not.

A bailiff uncuffed Dana's hands while she sat hunched with Stuart Sachs. The defense had opposed photographers in the courtroom, but it was a losing battle. The law allows the media to cover news stories in the third branch of government—the judiciary. Stuart explained to Dana what was going to happen, how he thought they should proceed and what to expect from the prosecution. Stuart told Dana that he wasn't ready to have her enter a plea. He wanted to delay her arraignment until they had received more police reports and investigative results from the DA's office. It was the prosecution's job to turn over all material they planned to use at trial to the defense, a process called “discovery” that usually drags on much longer than a day or two after the initial arrest, especially with large, comprehensive investigations. In this case, there were two agencies that had investigated four different crime scenes and seized mountains of evidence from those scenes as well as from the defendant's home. It would take months to get all the reports. Dana wasn't thrilled with delaying anything. She was in a hurry to get to trial and get out, but she went along with Stuart's suggestion.

When they finished talking, Rick tried to get her attention, but he found he was competing for her attention with Lisa Sloan, who was blowing kisses to Dana. The press went wild, taking pictures of the beautiful blonde nurse blowing kisses to an accused female serial killer. If Dana and Lisa were lovers, or if the slayings were part of a lesbian love triangle, they wanted photos. Dana didn't return the kisses, but simply turned and smiled at Lisa. Dana saw Rick and ignored him. He finally went up to the bailiff to see if he could have a word with her, but the bailiff said he could not. Rick then asked if he could ask Dana to sign something and pulled a sheet of paper out of a folder. It was a form Dana needed to sign before the police could release the contents of the storage unit containing his belongings. The bailiff took the paper over to Dana. Rick could see from where he was standing at the rail that she refused to sign it. Rick got his paper back and returned to his seat in the courtroom.

The proceeding took just a few minutes. Dana never said a word. Sachs asked for a continuance and the judge agreed, setting a return date for April 8. Still chained, Dana was led out of the courtroom as Lisa continued to blow kisses.

Afterward, Rick Ward courted the press, revealing his theory of why his half-sister had become a serial killer who went on post-murder shopping binges. He recounted how he had raised his younger half-sister from the age of 13 and said she had always been a spendthrift with budget problems who was constantly asking friends and relatives for money. Rick told reporters that he had been generous with emotional support and had even loaned Dana his furniture and other personal belongings, which he was now trying to get back. Rick told the reporters the last thing his half-sister had said to him: “Are you pissed off enough to stroke off and die? I hope so.”

6 P.M.

“Do you think I did it?”

Dana's voice was quiet. She was looking at her father through the glass in the visiting room of the county jail. On one side of the glass was a long row of inmates seated at shallow carrels facing their husbands, boyfriends, children, parents and friends on the other side of the glass. Each side had a row of big, black phones. It was very noisy. Children were squealing as they played around the chairs, visitors shouted over the din and the noises reverberated off the hard linoleum floor.

Russell hesitated a bit.

“Th–the evidence is very damaging, honey,” he said carefully. “I don't think—I think a lot of it's circumstantial.”

“You know, we're not supposed to talk about the case over the phone, but I needed to ask you face-to-face,” Dana said, her voice quavering slightly, “because I need your love and support, Dad.”

“You've got that,” Russell said quickly. “You'll always have that, whether you did it or didn't do it. You know that.”

“OK, that's all I wanted to hear.”

Dana and Russell had been talking about the mess left by police after the search, which had left Jim's house looking as if it had been tossed upside down. Jim was incensed about the hole—about the size of a newborn's fist—that criminalists had cut in the driver's seat of his truck. Police had taken his checkbook, his bankbook, and several sets of keys, including those to a storage shed out back. Dana said she wanted to compensate Jim for his loss.

“As soon as they release my Cadillac, I want you to sell it and I want you to give the money to Jim to fix his truck,” Dana said.

Dana also wanted her father to pick up some pictures of her mother that she had left at an art and framing store. She spelled out the name of the store and the location. But Russell was still curious about his daughter's culpability.

“What do you think, do you think you did it, honey?”

“No,” Dana said flatly.

“Hm?”

“I did use June's credit card.”

“…I know that,” Russell said.

“And I did write checks and take some money out of a lady's account I didn't know. But I did not kill June. I did not, Dad.”

“What about the lady in Sun City?”

“No. I'm not supposed to talk about it—”

“Well, we won't—”

“—over the phone, but I'm telling you no.”

“OK, we'll go through the attorney,” Russ said.

Dana said she wrote out an explanation for Stuart that she wanted Russ to read. She also read him a portion of a letter she had written to Jim about keeping Jason in his private preschool, which brought Dana to tears. She said she was concerned that Jason would be traumatized by the events. Russell said he was too young to really understand what was going on, but Dana insisted that he was being harmed. She said she had been trying to give Jason a stable mother to come home to every day, something Dana's own mother could not provide her because she had worked during the day.

“But with Jason now, what's going to happen if the worst happens to me? I want Jason to have as much love and support when he comes home,” she said, crying. “What does he have to come home to? There's no Dana there to give him a bath and cook his meals!”

Dana turned her anguish from Jason to her dire straits behind bars. She pleaded hysterically with her father to help her get a vegetarian diet and medical attention for her “terrible” bleeding. Even though Russell had just placed $100 in her jail account, she asked for more, tried to play on his sympathy, claimed she was vomiting every day, and told him that the jail psychiatrist wanted to medicate her.

“Every single meal I have thrown up,” she said with surprising vigor for anyone who was truly ill. “I'm real weak, Dad. I can't eat. It's been six, seven days since I've eaten …

“I need to get some help [for] my female problems at a
real
doctor at a
real
hospital … This is a butcher place.”

Russell reminded her that he was having knee surgery and would be “laid up for a few days,” but Dana was unable to consider her father's needs.

“Well, I hope someone comes out to see me, Dad, because it's, it's
hell.
”

Monday

3/21

Jim, I [sic] sitting here waiting at 8:00 P.M. at Night to take a fucking shower!

Her first letter to Jim was more than 20 pages, scrawled in pencil and giving him a snapshot of the indignities of living life in a 6-foot-by-12-foot cinder-block cell where privacy is nonexistent. “I had a day-crew of pod officers (they oversee us) that acted like it was too much that I needed extra peripads just 'cause I'm bleeding my brains out!” Her fear of abandonment was so acute, she immediately started to question Jim's loyalty and even discussed their relationship with her father before even speaking to Jim. “I talked to my dad and he assures me even more how you won't ditch me.” She promised that her parents would “watch over him” and told him that despite the nasty stories in the press, “… I see our live as a hot summer blast against all the shame, finger-pointing and crap we both endure. We can come out about this. We must do it together as a family…”